John Mix Stanley

During the 1830s Stanley was an itinerant sign and portrait painter, traveling between Detroit and Chicago. In 1839, while in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, he painted Indian subjects and landscapes. Three years later he was at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, gathering Indian material and painting portraits, which he exhibited in Cincinnati in 1846. In that year he also accompanied Colonel Stephen Kearny from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to San Diego [California], producing images for Kearny's official expedition report.In 1847 Stanley traveled up the Pacific Coast to sketch native Americans. For the next two years he lived in Hawaii, painting portraits of the native inhabitants. In 1849–50 he toured his Indian Gallery in the East. Although Congress declined to purchase his 150 canvases, the paintings remained in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where they were destroyed by fire in 1865. Another collection of his work was lost under similar circumstances at P. T. Barnum's museum in New York.In 1853–54 Stanley accompanied Isaac Stevens's Pacific Railway Survey as photographer and artist. Stanley spent the rest of his life repainting his lost works and organizing their exhibition, sale, and reproduction.William Truettner, edThe West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920(Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)